DVD Review: Revenge of the Petites

'Recalls a more glorious phase in the history of the adult industry…'

All of your high school fantasies have come true (or at least all the movie-related ones have) with ATKingdom’s release of Revenge of the Petites, featuring a roll call of adult stars including Marie McCray, Skin Diamond, Celeste Star, and Sativa Verte. The X-rated ode to leering ‘80s sex romps is now available in a three-disc collector’s edition, replete with cast interviews, extended footage, an epic behind-the-scenes documentary, and bouncy, retro throwback theme song so catchy you’ll be humming it in your sleep for weeks.

McCrae and Diamond star as namesake college freshmen Marie and Skin, whose primary goal as they intrepidly embark on their first semester of college is to get in good with the socially preeminent members of Theta House, the campus’ reigning sorority. Unfortunately, Skin and Marie are “Petites” – porn lingo for ladies of youthful appearance and diminutive stature, ostracized by mainstream aesthetics, and frustratingly relegated to the fringe realms of fetish iconography.

Finding their initial advances rebuffed, Skin and Marie are finally able to wangle a Theta House invite for what they’re told is an after-hours pledge recruitment, but after being forced to endure a sweaty, sticky, and generally humiliating hazing ritual (broadcast live over the Internet for thousands of their fellow students to witness), the prospective pledges are shocked and outraged to discover that their “hazing” was merely a cruel prank, and the Theta House girls have already sneeringly rejected them. Determined to get revenge, Marie and Skin set out on a quest to recruit their fellow campus Petites in retaliation against the Thetas, hoping to prove once and for all – by whatever devious, underhanded, and raunchy means necessary – that Petites are people too.

There’s really no higher praise that can be offered to a movie like Revenge of the Petites than to declare, with total sincerity, that it is in fact a movie. Porn with a perfunctory plot has become a humdrum standard of the industry (sometimes referred to, simply and insultingly, as “couples porn”) but the chronologically specific comedy subgenre Revenge of the Petites references is apt for more than a few reasons, one of which is that, back in the shot-on-celluloid era, narrative quality and production value were actually considered relevant aspects of pornography – particularly in the post-Deep Throat, pre-VHS epoch, when the promise of porn’s eventual mainstream bleed-over still seemed like a fresh and tantalizing possibility.

Though the cheap availability of digital porn has largely usurped the cost-driven emphasis on competitive mainstream production value, the ubiquity of adult content online has once again poised the professional-grade adult industry for narrative and technical innovation, or at very least a bombastic explosion of flailing roadshow gimmickry (just look at the teeming glut of porn parodies that’s been issuing forth lately from major studios like Hustler). With its cuddly nostalgia quotient, and its actually extant story, characters and cinematography, Revenge of the Petites simultaneously recalls a more glorious phase in the history of the adult industry, and glorifies the adolescent, boob-obsessed silliness that makes porn so appealing to begin with.